Today on-line gaming, with popular games like Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft, has become one of the most important services in wireline Internet access. With the introduction of new high performance wireless networks on-line games can now also be played over a radio network.
In radio and fixed networks the Quality of service or Quality of experience (QoS or QoE), and how the end-user perceives a service, has been measured for speech for many years, and new methods emerge to measure the quality of multimedia services. Typically, measurements are done with objective models, which take measurable input parameters and calculates an opinion score representing the end-user perceived quality.
Studies have been done to investigate how network properties, such as packet latency, affect the quality of on-line gaming, see for example T. Lang, \User Experience while playing Halo with network delay or loss,” Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures, CAIA, Swinburne University of Technology, Tech. Rep. 031205A, December 2003. [Online]. Available: http://www.caia.swinburne.edu.au/ and P. Branch and G. Armitage, \Measuring the auto-correlation of server to client traffic in First Person Shooter games,” Swinburne University, December 2003. [Online] Available: http://www.caia.swinburne.edu.au/, which both address the playing phase of on-line gaming.
However, there exist no way for a service provider to measure the perceived quality of an on-line gaming session using a wireless or wireline connection.